SAMOA’S players feel their performance was not as bad as the 52-16 scoreline suggested in their World Cup warm-up outing against England Knights at Salford.

“We had 26 players to rotate because it was our trial, so we couldn’t really work the combinations,” said Mose Masoe, the Penrith Panthers powerhouse who has signed for St Helens in 2014.

“England were a tough side and we didn’t match up. We need to pick up on little things, work on our ruck defence and we’ll pull together I reckon.”

He added: “I felt we took England Knights a bit lightly and they just rolled over the top of us. The big boys just went straight through the middle. I was amazed at how good they were.”

Saints back rower Sia Soliola was mostly concerned with the defensive issues ahead of Samoa’s opening Group B clash with holders New Zealand at Warrington’s Halliwell Jones Stadium on Sunday, kick off 6pm.

“It was a hard game and we just brought it on ourselves,” he said.

“We didn’t react as well as we wanted to with our errors. We knew mistakes would be made and we’d be quite rusty but I thought our reaction to a lot of things – a lot of errors – were just poor. We could have done better.”

Samoa are missing old campaigners Roy Asotasi, Tony Puletua and Jeff Lima for the tournament.

And Soliola said: “There were a lot of young guys in the team.

“You could say we were inexperienced from what we’ve had before but that’s no excuse with the energy in defence.

“We’d talked about it all week and you can’t substitute effort.

“No matter who you are on the field, as long as you’ve got effort and energy and show that you want to be there it helps towards winning a lot of big games.”